Warren Murphy: The Final Reel

Across the room the VCR spat out Assola's bootleg copy of The Wild Wild West.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was happy.

It had taken a long time for him to isolate and identify the emotion. After all, happiness wasn't something he was used to grappling with.

As a professional assassin in the employ of CURE, the most secret agency in the United States government, his mood had long ago found root in the darker end of the emotional spectrum. And there it festered. Throughout his adult life he had been by and large a dour person with flashes of annoyance colored by shades of bile.

But not anymore. At least not right now.

Only a few months before he had brought to an end one of the most miserable years of his life. During that time duty had skipped Remo Williams across the globe like a flat stone hurled across the water's surface. He had gone from compass point to map speck, crossing longitudes and latitudes, dropping down in countries he hadn't even known existed. But it had now, finally, completely, come to an end.

And it was at the end of this dark cycle that Remo found himself experiencing an alien sensation. When he stripped away all other emotional possibilities there was only one he was left with. Happiness. Remo was startled at the discovery. And, he quickly found, the fact that he was happy made him even happier.

For a man who had nearly always found gloom to be the most comfortable part of his simple emotional wardrobe, it was like entering a new world. He was a walking corpse who, after years of wandering, had miraculously shed its eternal shroud.

And so it was that the evening breeze found Remo Williams whistling happily to himself as he loitered on the broad front steps of Boston's city hall.

Remo smiled at passing pedestrians. Few smiled back. Although he had been standing in the yellow lamplight for almost half an hour, few of the passersby even paid him any attention at all. This was because there was precious little about him that would have warranted a second glance.

Remo was a thin man who appeared to be somewhere in his early thirties. Although the air was cool on this late-May evening, he wore a simple black cotton T-shirt and a pair of matching chinos. He was of average height, with a face that usually skirted the border between average and cruel.

In point of fact there were only two things about him that were outwardly unusual. First were his wrists. They were freakishly large-like enveloping casts of solid flesh and bone. The second was the copper-bottomed stainless-steel pot that dangled from his right index finger.

Given his attire, it was easy for those who saw him to assume he was some kind of indigent. In fact, of the people who did notice him, a few who passed him as he was waiting attempted to flip change into Remo's pot. These were obviously tourists.

In a state like Massachusetts-whose citizens had a habit of making virtues out of vices-Boston was still an enclave of extremists. Its residents were of the breed that regularly chastised the government for not offering more handouts to every group that screamed its disenfranchised status on the nightly news. In short, Boston's residents were extremely generous when it came to everyone else's money but were as tight as a Gabor face-lift when it came to their own.

Since their acts of personal charity extended only as far as the voting booth, it was a simple enough matter for Remo to weed the residents from the tourists. Those offering him handouts were the tourists.

As he stood waiting, a middle-aged pedestrian strolled by.

"You all set, pal?" the passerby asked, fishing in his pockets as he spoke. He didn't wait for a response. The man tossed a few crumpled singles at Remo's dangling pot.

With a speed that startled the pedestrian, Remo flipped the pot around. In a blur he used the bottom of the pot to swat the money away. The bills fluttered to the sidewalk.

"I'm fine," he promised with a smile.

Remo's would-be benefactor seemed surprised when his money was refused. He became even more so when he stooped to pick the bills up. Another hand was already on them.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" demanded a new voice. This one was shrill and tyrannical-and female.

The woman's face was a jiggling mass of sagging, angry flesh. Her prominent blue-blooded jaw quivered furiously at the man whose money she was attempting to take.

Remo recognized her. For years Jullian Styles had had a national cooking show, The Master Culinarian, on public television.

On TV she was comically frightening. In real life the octogenarian chef was a hunching, six-and-a-half-foot-tall walking parody of herself.

Remo remembered reading a blurb about Jullian Styles in one of the local papers a few years back. A black family had decided to move into her exclusive lily-white neighborhood in the Boston suburb of Brookline. A good liberal, Ms. Styles was a firm believer in the equality of all persons just as long as the people she considered equal to her had the good sense not to reciprocate those feelings.

When equality and decency threatened the bastion of racial purity that was her own neighborhood, the famous chef had been quoted as saying, "Why don't they ship these hubcap-stealing darkies to Harlem or wherever it is they keep those people?" In the ensuing melee her publicist claimed poor Jullian had been jet-lagged, drunk on cooking sherry and quoted out of context. Anyone else would have been run out of town on a rail. But because of her political leanings, reruns of Jullian's show were still a staple on public TV.

As Remo watched, the Master Culinarian shoved the man roughly to one side. Quick as a wink, she snatched up the crumpled dollar bills in her blueveined hand.

"Excuse me, but that's mine," the man explained weakly.

"This sidewalk is public property," Jullian Styles announced imperiously. "Therefore anything that lands on it becomes public property. I am the public. Therefore," she said, drawing herself up as far as the considerable hump on her back would allow, "this money is mine."

With that she turned on one sensible heel and marched away with the cash. The startled tourist didn't know what to say. He looked to Remo for help.

"Ah, Boston in the spring," Remo sighed in explanation.

As the baffled man wandered off in the wake of the haughty TV chef, Remo felt a sudden change in air pressure at his back. He glanced up at the Cambridge Street doors of Boston's city hall.

An entourage of six men had just stepped out into the chill night air. The man Remo was searching for was in the center of the small crowd. He looked like a walrus that had been kidnapped from an Arctic ice floe and stuffed into an ill-fitting blue suit. The too short arms that bounced at his sides seemed as if they'd just stopped by his body for a visit. His porcine eyes lacked even a rudimentary flicker of human intelligence.

The knot of men descended.

As the group passed by him on the staircase, Remo took a step forward. "Mr. Mayor?" he called, just to make sure.

When the lifeless eyes turned his way, Remo knew he had the right man.

When the mayor stopped, the group paused around him.

"What?" barked Boston's chief elected official, sounding for all the world like a yelping sea lion. His mumbling speech pattern sounded worse than it did on TV. It was as if his lips and tongue got in the way of his words. Remo was half-tempted to toss a fish into his mouth. Instead he smiled broadly. "I'd like to show you something," Remo offered grandly.

The men around the mayor tensed. They didn't see Remo as any great threat, since he wasn't carrying a visible weapon. Unless they counted the Revere Ware pot that Remo held up in the air before them.

"The mayor doesn't have time," one of the men snarled.